How we did it: the winners of the IJCNN Social Network Challenge

First things first: in case anyone is wondering about our team name, we are all computer scientists, and most of us work in cryptography or related fields. IND CCA refers to a property of an encryption algorithm. Other than that, no particular significance.

I myself work in computer security and privacy, and my specialty is de-anonymization. That explains why the other team members (Elaine Shi, Ben Rubinstein, and Yong J Kil) invited me to join them with the goal of de-anonymizing the contest graph and combining that with machine learning.

To clarify: our goal was to map the nodes in the training dataset to the real identities in the social network that was used to create the data. That would allow us to simply look up the pairs of nodes in the test set in the real graph to see whether or not the edge exists. There would be a small error rate because some edges may have changed after the Kaggle crawl was conducted, but we assumed this would be negligible.

Knowing that the social network in question is Flickr, we crawled a few million users' contacts from the site. The crawler was written in python, using the curl library, and was run on a small cluster of 2-4 machines.

While our crawl covered only a fraction of Flickr users, it was biased towards high degree nodes (we explicitly coded such a bias, but even a random walk is biased towards high degree nodes), so we were all set. By the time we crawled 1 million nodes we were hitting a 60-70% coverage of the 38k nodes in the test set. But more on that later.

Our basic approach to deanonymization is described in my paper with Vitaly Shmatikov. Broadly, there are two steps: “seed finding” and “propagation.” In the former step we somehow deanonymize a small number of nodes; in the latter step we use these as “anchors” to propagate the deanonymization to more and more nodes. In this step the algorithm feeds on its own output.

Let me first describe propagation because it is simpler. As the algorithm progresses, it maintains a (partial) mapping between the nodes in the true Flickr graph and the Kaggle graph. We iteratively try to extend the mapping as follows: pick an arbitrary as-yet-unmapped node in the Kaggle graph, find the “most similar” node in the Flickr graph, and if they are “sufficiently similar,” they get mapped to each other.

Similarity between a Kaggle node and a Flickr node is defined as cosine similarity between the already-mapped neighbors of the Kaggle node and the already-mapped neighbors of the Flickr node (nodes mapped to each other are treated as identical for the purpose of cosine comparison).

In the diagram, the blue nodes have already been mapped. The similarity between A and B is 2 / (√3·√3) = ⅔. Whether or not edges exist between A and A’ or B and B’ is irrelevant.

There are many heuristics that go into the “sufficiently similar” criterion, which will be described in our upcoming paper. There are two reasons why the similarity between a node and its image may not be 100%: because the contest graph is slightly different from our newer crawled graph, and because the mapping itself might have inaccuracies. The /latter is minimal, and in fact the algorithm occasionally revisits already-mapped nodes to correct errors in the light of more data.

I have elided over many details — edge directionality makes the algorithm significantly more complex, and there are some gotchas due to the fact that the Kaggle graph is only partially available. Overall, however, this was a relatively straightforward adaptation of the algorithm in the abovementioned paper with Shmatikov.

Finding seeds was much harder. Here the fact that the Kaggle graph is partial presented a serious roadblock, and rules out the techniques we used in the paper. The idea of looking at the highest-degree nodes was obvious enough, but the key observation was that if you look at the nodes by highest in-degree, then the top nodes in the two graphs roughly correspond to each other (whereas ordered by out-degree, only about 1/10 of the Flickr nodes are in the Kaggle dataset). This is because of the way the Kaggle graph is constructed: all the contacts of each of the 38K nodes are reported, and so the top in-degree nodes will show up in the dataset whether or not they’re part of the 38K.

Still, it’s far from a straightforward mapping if you look at the top 20 in the two graphs. During the contest I found the mapping by hand after staring at two matrices of numbers for a couple of hours, but later I was able to automate it using simulated annealing. We will describe this in detail in the paper. Once we get 10-20 seeds, the propagation kicks off fairly easily.

On to the results. We were able to deanonymize about 80% of the nodes, including the vast majority of the high-degree nodes (both in- and out-degree.) We’re not sure what the overall error rate is, but for the high-degree nodes it is essentially zero.

Unfortunately this translated to only about 60% of the edges. This is because the edges in the test set aren’t sampled uniformly from the training graph; it is biased towards low-degree nodes, and deanonymization succeeds less often on low-degree nodes.

Thus, deanonymization alone would have been far from sufficient. Fortunately, Elaine, Ben and Yong did some pretty cool machine learning, which, while it would not have won the contest on its own, would have given the other machine-learning solutions a run for their money.

Elaine sends me the following description:

Our ML algorithm is quite similar to what vsh described earlier. However, we implemented fewer features, and spent less time fine tuning parameters. That's why our ML performance is a bit lower, with an *estimated* AUC of 93.5-94%.

(Note that the AUC for ML is not corroborated with Kaggle due to the submission quota, but rather, is computed over the ground truth from the deanonymization. The estimate is biased, since the deanonymized subset is not sampled randomly from the test set. [The 93.5-94% number is after applying Elaine’s debiasing heuristic. -- Arvind])

We also used Random Forest over features a bunch of features, including the following (with acknowledgements to the "social network link prediction" paper):
1) whether reverse edge is present
2) Adamic
3) |intersection of neighbors| / |union of neighbors|
4) Neighborhood clustering coefficient
5) Localized random walk 2 - 4 steps
6) Degree of n1/n2.
7) ... and a few other features, most are 1-3 hop neighborhood characteristics.

For some of the above-mentioned features, we computed values for the out-graph, in-graph, and the bi-directional graph (i.e., union of in-graph and out-graph). We wanted to implement more features, but did not due to lack of time

The best feature by itself is the localized random walk 3-4 steps. This feature on its own has an *estimated* AUC of 92%. The Random Forest implementation used the Python Milk library. http://pypi.python.org/pypi/milk/

Finally, like every one else, there were some trial-and-error tuning and adjustments.

Once we hit No. 1, we emailed the organizers to ask if what we did was OK. Fortunately, they said it was cool. Nevertheless, it is interesting to wonder how a future contest might prevent deanonymization-based solutions. There are two basic approaches: construct the graph so that it is hard to deanonymize, or require the winner to submit the code for human inspection. Neither is foolproof; I’m going to do some thinking about this but I’d like to hear other ideas.

That is all very well, but I think you could have done a better job of it if you used fuzzy phase edge detection.

Francois Borges

Sorry for posting twice, I forgot the reason I posted in the first place until I finished and submitted it.

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